Artist's conception of a Navy amphibious transport dock ship being used in the recovery of the Orion spacecraft.

NASA's new Orion manned spacecraft, which is designed to return to earth by parachuting into the sea, will undergo a key development test early next year in the waters off San Diego.

The space agency says online that NASA and the Navy will attempt to smoothly guide an Orion capsule into the well deck of the amphibious transport dock ship San Diego, whose stern opens into the ocean to handle transport craft.

The test will be held in January 2014, provided that things go well during a similar but less ambitious test this summer at Naval Station Norfolk.

The amphibious transport dock San Diego was commissioned in San Diego in May 2012.

A four-day Underway Recovery Test will follow on the San Diego "to evaluate hardware and recovery processes in progressively more challenging environments to determine capability limits," Hamblin added.

The Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, which can hold a crew of four, is the successor to the space shuttle, but doesn't resemble the vehicle it will replace. Orion bears more resemblance to the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space capsules, all of which landed in the sea, where they were recovered by the Navy. Engineers had been considering having Orion parachute on to land in the western United States. But attention has shifted to water landings, which NASA says has safety advantages.

Orion is meant to carry humans back to the moon, to an asteroid, and perhaps, some day, to Mars. But the spacecraft is currently in the developmental stage and it has no specific, funded mission. Instead, the space agency is simply trying to prove that they can develop a capsule that can be carried into space aboard a Delta rocket, and safely return to earth. NASA plans an unmanned test launch of Orion in 2014. The capsule is likely to land in the waters off Southern California, and transported by a warship to facilities in Long Beach, the space agency says.